Friday, May 30, 2014

Early morning, on a hunting expedition, a Noanama man is walking a
narrow Choco rain forest path. His ancient rifle was homemade and he does not
trust it. When spotting a monkey in a tree he keeps the rifle away from his
face, lest it explodes in his eyes.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Lit by the warm light of a setting sun, a Noanama girl sitting at the
edge of her family’s wall-less hut raised on stilts is dreamily watching the
Docordo river flow below in Colombia’s Choco rain forest.

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Watching her feet as she walks though muddy terrain, this Little Noanama
girl is carrying plantain from her family’s rain forest garden in Colombia’s
Choco Department. The strap holding the plantain on her back comes from a
strip of tree bark. The forest gives the Indians all they need to survive
comfortably.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Between Bilma and Agades, in Niger’s Sahara, the wells are so far apart,
and so much happens along the way of the Tuareg caravans, that they can never
stop until men and camels must rest for the night. But as interminably as the
caravans plow forward, they never reach the next well before the men are half
dead of thirst and dangerously dehydrated.

Many things delay them. Here
they come upon scattered blades of grass on which they must release the camels,which will help spare the straw the camels carry and must feed on every morning.

Next day, after spending
hours gathering the widely scattered camels, the Tuareg discover that two of them are missing.
They release the lot again and go hunting for the lost two, taking all day. By
then the water goat skins are hanging nearly flat from their makeshift tripods--water
of which the Tuareg never bring enough, preferring to load the camels with more
salt.

Farther along the way a camel
breaks a leg and must be butchered. Or a sand storm keeps everyone lying under
blankets for as long as three days (the storms abate at night).

Another reason why the
caravan must never stop is that, if it did for as little as a few minutes, the
camels would gather together, rub sides, throw down the breakable salt cones, and
leave the Tuareg poorer for it.

In 1965 I traveled for 22 days across the Tenere, one of the Sahara’s
most dangerous regions, with a Tuareg salt caravan. At the salt pits of Bilma,
an oasis in Niger, hundreds of Tuareg, among thousands of camels, were wrapping
salt cones in straw mats and preparing for the long return journey to their
camps in the AÏr
Mountains.

Not one group accepted my
company. They all said that a European was not prepared for the agony of
hunger, thirst, and fatigue they would live, and that they would rather not
have to bury my bones in the desert’s sands.

I was on my first National Geographic assignment, and there
was no way I could say amen to this. Had I had money to offer the Tuareg, they
would probably have removed their objections. But I did not. And I was only at
the beginning of a four-month stay among the Tuareg.

As I was untested by National Geographic, the editors had given
me only enough money to fly from New York to Europe. From there, traveling overland, I had
been struck by a knee infection that had nailed me for two weeks in a small Algerian
oasis’ flyblown hospital. Still unable to walk at the end, I had had to resign
myself to seek medical help in Brussels, my home town, where I lost another two
weeks. I flew this time—both ways, as I feared to reach the caravans’
departures too late.

Fortunately, by the time I
reached Bilma I had already spent two weeks traveling on camel back with a Tuareg
man to photograph Tuareg tribes around the Sahara’s Ahaggar Mountains. A year earlier I had spent
a month with two Tuareg brothers, traveling on camel back between Agades, in
Niger, and Tamanrasset, in Algeria.

I have a passion for
languages and learn them easily. With the help of a lexicon I had learned
enough of the Tuareg language to communicate with them without the need for an
interpreter. And I knew all I had to know about camels and desert life.

After finding an undermanned
group of nine men and 102 camels, I offered them to join them as a working member
of the caravan who would give priority to caravan work over photography.

That proved irresistible and
they accepted. My story appeared on the cover of National Geographic’s November 1965 issue. The magazine paid all my
past expenses, besides a generous fee and an invitation to keep adventuring in their
name. Over the years I would live a total of nine months among the Tuareg, three
times for National Geographic and once for a children’s book.

Monday, May 26, 2014

Water here, in Niger, in a Saharan Tuareg camp, is no more than a mirage
on the distant horizon. This Tuareg boy is on his way to ask relatives living in
another tent for a drink of water—in case, unlike his parents, they haven’t run
out of water as well.

The well is far from camp. An hour or two each way, riding a donkey.
Plus the hours-long wait in line behind other nomads watering vast herds of camels,
sheep, and goats. Not a daily trip. In
fact, to delay the chore the boy’s family often drinks only milk during a day or
two after running out of water. Forget taking a bath. The scorching sun is
what takes care of germs.

The Tuareg and other nomads always camp far from wells. It protects
their privacy. And their animals find nothing to feed on over wide areas around
wells. The daily passage of herds cleans
them of the tiniest shoot of grass.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

I photographed this Tuareg man of the noble Kel Rela tribe near the
Sahara’s well of In Abbangarit in Niger. Though he was holding a leather whip,
he rarely used it.

Tribesmen in Arabia and other parts of the Sahara saddle their camels over
or behind the humps, legs dangling on each sides, which leaves them little
control over the animals other than through whips.

The Tuareg saddle their camels in front of the humps. This allows them
to rest naked feet on their camels’ necks. To make camels kneel down they only
need to apply repeated downward pressure on the camels’ necks. To accelerate
the pace of camels into a gallop they only need to apply repeated forward pressure
to the camels’ necks. Such control helps the Tuareg to be the world’s best
camel riders.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Having spent the night far from his family’s tents, watching over his camels, this noble Taitoq Tuareg man of Niger’s Sahara Desert brought the
animals back next morning to be milked. While he is resting, two of the family’s
boys keep an eye on the camels browsing at some distance. Later that day, the man will take the camels
back to the better pasture until the following morning again.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

In northern Kenya’s Mathews Range, also known as the Lenkiyo Hills, a little
Samburu girl is feeding a baby goat some leftover milk after its mother has
been milked. The girl’s mother is holding the last of the jugs she filled with
her goats’ milk. Milk is all her family has for breakfast every day.

I walked eight days around the range, photographing the people along the way, using three Samburu men and three pack camels.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

In Bali, an Indonesian Island, my clicking camera brought a brief smile
to the face of a woman who, with others, was watching the passage of a funeral
procession. Most women lining the street were carrying on their heads offerings
they would display on a large makeshift table outside a Balinese Hindu temple. The old lady in
her coffin would be cremated there and quite joyously dispatched to a better world.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

This Wodaabe nomad man of Niger’s Sahel is watching other men dance the
Gerewol, which doubles as an annual male beauty contest between clans. It takes
place during the few weeks of rain that provide enough pasture and water for
those people’s zebus to allow the tribe to stay together at one place for a
while.

The way he and a friend lean
on each other does not connote homosexuality and is common among Wodaabe men
and women.

Friday, May 16, 2014

Last month, Highlights for Children magazine published my story of two inseparable
nine-year-old Ashanti girls of Ghana. This picture, which ended Becky-and-Bonsa’s
story, shows them going for a walk at day’s end, still full of things to tell
each other before going to bed. I photographed them in Adukrom, a big village
of wonderful cocoa-growing people surrounded by tall and thick rain forest near
Kumasi.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

I photographed the following scene in Salvador, Brazil, in 1971.
Supported by two musicians, a man challenged spectators to face him in a bout
of capoeira, a form of Brazilian martial art, for a prize. A valiant teenager
did, but was not long in biting the dust, and the coins that fell in the ring
went to the man.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Squatting next to Rio Preto in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest, a woman
washes dishes and polishes pots. Behind her and to her left are two canoes.

Rio Preto means Black River in Potuguese. There are many black rivers in
the Amazon, including Rio Negro, South America’s second most powerful river after
the Amazon, of which it is a tributary.

Black rivers look like black mirrors. However, when scooped in a hand
their waters have the color of tea. They even taste like tea. Unlike white
rivers, which run over sand and clay, they run over rocks and should be
transparent instead of muddy, like the Amazon. They get their color by soaking
the surrounding vegetation when seasonally flooding the forest.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

One of travel’s rewards is the
unexpected you can nearly always count on when leaving behind the boredom of modern life. In 1994, when I climbed southern Colombia’s
Cumbal Volcano with my family, our goal was to peek inside its crater. We never
imagined we would be watching farmers carrying blocks of fossil ice on their
backs from the bottom of that crater.

Now the farmers quickly wrapped
the ice inside grass and espeletias. This would protect its temperature from
the sun and the warm sides of the horses which would carry it down the volcano.
The men told us they would sell the ice
to small ice cream makers in villages far below.

Unfortunately, we had arrived
too late to watch them ax the ice out of the rocks. They were done for the day.
And soon forever. Electricity and refrigerators would soon reach those villages.

Shucking corn in his backyard was only one of the many activities this quiet
man happily shared with his wife in the small town of Uchucmarca in Peru’s
Amazonas Province. While on a 1976 Natural History magazine assignment in the
couple’s remote region, which lacked accommodations of any type, I had to base
myself in their modest house. But the bread they baked and sold to their
neighbors, and the wife’s alfalfa soup, were among the best I tasted anywhere.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Is there a better place anywhere to photograph people with their guards
down than at markets? I don’t think so.
Imagine how visible a blond, blue-eyed photographer dressed differently
from the surrounding crowd should be. But to women anxious to put their hands
on the best cabbage I was not even there. I shot this scene in Pisac, in the
Cusco province of Peru’s Andes Mountains, some time in the seventies.

Friday, May 2, 2014

I shot this caravanserai at dusk in Ghazni, Afghanistan, in 1965 while
on a National Geographic assignment to
document a summer-end migration of Kuchi (Pashtun) nomads from the cooling
Hindu Kush Mountains down to the warmer lowlands around Jalalabad.

Signed Prints

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